The following discussion sets forth the inventors' own knowledge of certain technologies and/or problems associated therewith. Accordingly, this discussion is not an admission of prior art, and it is not an admission of the knowledge available to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
The telecommunications market includes many different service providers, each typically offering compatible communications services. Compatibility is often required so that customers of one service provider can communicate with friends, family, or other end users who may be customers of another service provider. Although service providers typically offer services that are compatible with other service provider networks, there has not conventionally been a direct connect option between users of diverse service provider networks.
One prior solution for handling interfaces between different service provider networks is conventionally handled by a third party intermediary. The third party intermediary would typically establish an interconnect agreement with many different service providers, and then provide connection services between users of the different service provider networks.
In certain situations, a communication will hop between multiple third parties or across multiple carriers in order to find an agreed path between communication endpoints. In legacy systems, a call may be routed through several carriers before connecting between the end users. Each connection may include connection and/or termination fees. These prior systems become very complex and expensive.
Today, packet routing paths for sessions are typically determined via centralized 3rd party routing entities or pre-agreed upon between service providers. This approach leads to lack of flexibility to update available routes, change costs in real time, and allow the use of new connectivity paths to exploit existing routable points provided by service providers.